Music / Died During Production

Musicians who either:

Died during the creation of a piece/series of work. In the case of classical composers, the unfinished work may be completed by other composers or musicologists. In the case of recording artists, it might occur after they finished recording but before the record was released.
Died before going on a scheduled performance. This can happen during the planning stage, the rehearsal, or even en route to the performance.
Or died in the middle of a tour.

open/close all folders

Alternative/Indie Rock

Gustavo Cerati passed away in 2014 before finishing the last music videos for his final album.
Depending on who you ask, there are between ten and two hundred unreleased Kurt Cobain and/or Nirvana songs (the truth, likely, is somewhere in between the two extremes). How "finished" the hypothetical tracks are is also a subject of some debate, with Dave Grohl, Krist Novoselic, Courtney Love, and any number of other people often contradicting one another, and occasionally, more often than that in Love's case, contradicting themselves. The only thing they all seem to agree on is that there are Kurt Cobain tracks the fans have not heard, and probably never will until Love dies, and even then only maybe. The massive 2004 box set With the Lights Out which contains many unreleased Nirvana songs and demos alongside previously released rarities, is considered merely the tip of the iceberg of the Nirvana cache to fans. A previously unreleased but well-known late period Nirvana recording, "You Know You're Right", was attached to a greatest hits album in 2002 and (along with already released contemporaneous tracks like "Sappy") merely hinted at what directions a fourth Nirvana album could have gone.
Soundgarden frontman Chris Cornell died shortly after performing a concert with the band in Detroit in May 2017. The death was later determined to be a suicide by hanging, which shocked many given Cornell had tweeted very optimistic messages in the days and hours before his death. The band was in the middle of an American tour and in the process of recording their seventh album. The tour was canceled, and Soundgarden would officially disband in 2018. Cornell's death also ended the brief reunion of his other band Audioslave, who had performed a one-off concert just a few months prior, and were strongly hinting that there would be more activity in the future. On January 16, 2019, the surviving Soundgarden members reunited for a tribute concert, "I Am the Highway: A Tribute to Chris Cornell", which featured the likes of the Foo Fighters, Metallica, Pearl Jam and Peter Frampton. The band also revealed they had been working on an album when he died, but any development is withheld as they don't have access to the master recordings with Cornell's vocals.
Mary Hansen, the guitarist and backing vocalist for the British art rock band Stereolab, was killed in 2002 when she was hit by a truck while riding her bicycle. A solo EP she had been working on, Hybrid, wasn't released until 2004 when it was completed by her Stereolab band-mate Andy Ramsay. Hansen's harmony and counter-melody vocals were considered to be an essential part of Stereolab's signature sound, and many fans believe that they never musically recovered from her death. Over the next decade, the famously prolific band released just three more albums.
Foo Fighters drummer Taylor Hawkins died suddenly on March 25, 2022, only hours before the band was scheduled to perform at the Festival Estéreo Picnic in Bogota, Colombia. They cancelled the remainder of their 2022 world tour. They were also expected to perform at the 2022 Grammy Awards the week after that before bowing out, although the Grammys announced that their slot would serve as a tribute to Hawkins instead.
Mark Linkous, leader/only constant member of cult indie rock band Sparklehorse, had dealt with depression for most of his life and had notably attempted suicide in 1996 while his band was touring as Radiohead's opening act. It caused damage to his legs which never fully healed. Linkous eventually took his own life in 2010, shortly before the wide release of his Dark Night of the Soul collaboration with Danger Mouse and David Lynch. Another project, Sparklehorse's fifth album, was left in a near-complete state. The recordings for the album were inherited by Linkous' brother and sister-in-law, who released it under the title Bird Machine on September 8, 2023.
Grant McLennan, the co-lead singer and songwriter for the Australian indie rock band The Go-Betweens, died suddenly of a heart attack in 2006. At the time, the band had been in the early stages of putting together their tenth album and were also preparing a compilation of the solo music that both McLennan and the band's other singer-songwriter Robert Forster had put out between the band's break-up in 1989 and their reunion in 2000. Work on the compilation, Intermission, was finished by Forster and was released in 2007. Some of the songs the two had written for a new album wound up on Forster's 2008 solo album The Evangelist.
Bradley Nowell, the singer, songwriter and guitarist for Sublime died a few months before the release of his band's breakout third album. This meant their label had a hit album, no band to send out on tour and no chance for a follow-up album. Instead, the surviving two members and Brad's dog Louie starred in a series of music videos released for each of the three singles released for the album. The label proceeded to fulfill the rest of the band's record deal with a continuous (and morbid) series of rarity and greatest hits albums that continue to be released to this day. The two other members went on to a series of other bands of varying success before reforming as Sublime with Rome, which is legally not the same thing as Sublime due to Nowell's estate owning the copyright on the name.
Dolores O'Riordan of The Cranberries died of an accidental drowning on January 15, 2018, in London, where she was doing some recording sessions, including featuring on a cover of her band's song "Zombie" by Bad Wolves. A month later, her surviving bandmates said that they would release her completed recordings as a final Cranberries album, In the End, which was released on April 26, 2019. Bad Wolves' cover of "Zombie" was released without her vocals as a tribute.
David Reilly, the lead singer of industrial rock band God Lives Underwater, died from a tooth infection in 2005. Two posthumous solo albums were released in 2013 (Life After the So-Called God Lives Underwater Age and Inside), featuring unreleased material.
Seattle-based alt-rock singer Shawn Smith, of the bands Brad, Satchel, and Pigeonhed, died of an aortic tear brought on by high blood pressure on April 5th, 2019, the anniversary of the deaths of fellow Seattle rockers Kurt Cobain and Layne Staley. At the time of his passing, Smith was contributing to a new Brad album, which would be released posthumously in 2023 as In The Moment That You're Born.
Grunge band The Gits were working on their second album when their frontwoman Mia Zapata was slain on the Seattle streets. The killer wouldn't be found for a decade.

Christian

When Keith Green died in a private plane crash in 1982; he had enough completed material in the can for two posthumously released albums; plus a number of demos appearing on varied compilation and tribute albums into the 1990s.
Rich Mullins died in a car accident in 1997 while working on The Jesus Record. It was released the following year as a double album — one disc of Rich's home demo recordings, the other disc featuring the same songs (plus one extra) given the full band treatment by Mullins' "Ragamuffin Band".

Classical

Johann Sebastian Bach rather famously failed to finish the fourteenth fugue in The Art of Fugue, cutting off right at the point where he introduced his own name as the subject (B♭-A-C-B, which, in the German way of naming notes, where B♭ is B, and B is H, is B-A-C-H), although this was more a case of setting it aside for a while and not getting back to it before his death rather than dying while working on it. There's also a convincing argument for the possibility that Bach actually left The Art of Fugue incomplete on purpose to serve as a musicological exercise, encouraging people to come up with their own completions. The fugue specifically cuts off after the first entrance of the "B-A-C-H" subject in counterpoint to the first and second subjects; the order in which the first three subjects appear in each of the four voices has led to speculation that Bach intended to make the final fugue a quadruple fugue, with the main subject from the previous fugues as the fourth subject. Some of the speculative completions of the fugue include the fourth subject (most notably that of Hungarian musicologist Zoltán Göncz), others only use the three already introduced by Bach.
Béla Bartók was working on his third piano concerto and his viola concerto at the time of his death from leukaemia in 1945; he had finished all but the orchestration of the final 17 bars of the piano concerto, which his student Tibor Serly polished off before the work's premiere (and which are now accepted as canonical in performances of the work). The viola concerto was in a much more fragmentary state, with much of the instrumentation and texture still to be completed; although both Serly and, fifty years later, the composer's son Peter (in collaboration with Paul Neubauer and Nelson Dellamaggiore) produced performance versions of the work, they are much more speculative than the performance version of the piano concerto.
Ludwig van Beethoven's Symphony No. 10 in E♭ major had a similar fate. Beethoven was already laying the groundwork for the symphony while composing his famous Symphony No. 9 and planned it as a sort of purely instrumental answer to the choral finale of No. 9. However, he only completed a few hundred bars' worth of sketches for the first movement before setting it aside, and he never returned to it. English musicologist Barry Cooper produced a speculative completion of the first movement and released a recording in 1988, but critics almost universally agree that the results are far less impressive than they would have been had Beethoven finished the symphony himself.
Alban Berg left his opera Lulu unfinished due to violinist Louis Krasner commissioning him to compose a violin concerto.^note Berg accepted the commission, since the $1,500 Krasner offered for the concerto was desperately needed at the time since performances of his works were quickly becoming scarce due to the Nazis. He composed the concerto rather quickly, but he died of blood poisoning on Christmas Eve 1935 with the orchestration of Act 3 still incomplete.^note Although little work was needed to be done to complete it, Alban's widow, Helene, successfully vetoed any attempts to do so until her death in 1976, after which the orchestration was successfully completed by Friedrich Cerha in 1979.
In 1989, Leonard Bernstein began a series of audio and video recordings of Ludwig van Beethoven's five piano concerti with Polish pianist Krystian Zimerman and the Vienna Philharmonic. However, after recording Nos.3-5, Bernstein was forced to announce his retirement from conducting due to declining health; he died five days later. Zimerman completed both the audio and video cycles in 1991 by conducting Nos.1 and 2 from the piano. Bernstein also planned to complete his rerecordings of Gustav Mahler's symphonies for Deutsche Grammophon with Symphony No. 8 in New York; due to his retirement and death, the label issued in its place a 15-year-old live recording of the same work from the Salzburg Festival with Bernstein conducting the Vienna Philharmonic.
Marc Blitzstein was working on the operas Idiots First and Sacco and Vanzetti when he was murdered in 1964. Both were subsequently completed by Leonard Lehrman.
Anton Bruckner planned for his Symphony No. 9 in D minor to be his last and grandest contribution to the form. However, he had only completed the first three movements at his death in 1896, and although he left enough sketches for the finale that several speculative completions have been produced, performed, and recorded, it is more usually performed as a three-movement work. Knowing he may not live to finish the piece, Bruckner suggested that his setting of the Te Deum prayer be used as a finale, but as it is in C major rather than D minor (or D major), this idea has never been popular.^note
Ferruccio Busoni left the opera Doktor Faust unfinished. Completions of it have been prepared by Philipp Jarnach, a pupil of the composer, and by Antony Beaumont using sketches by Busoni that were previously thought to have been lost.
Claude Debussy planned a collection of six instrumental sonatas, but only completed three before he died.
Sir Edward Elgar produced 130 pages of sketches for a third symphony after accepting a commission from The BBC in 1933, but he died of colorectal cancer the following year. Knowing he would not live to finish the symphony, he wavered between asking his friend W.H. Reed not to "let anyone tinker with it" and telling his doctor he expected someone would "complete it - or write a better one". Reed believed the sketches were insufficient to even attempt a completion, but in 1993, The BBC commissioned English composer Anthony Payne (who had been interested in the sketches since 1972) to put together a performance version of the full symphony (over initial objections from Elgar's heirs). Payne's completion was first performed in 1998, and has been performed and recorded several times since then.^note
George Gershwin died after writing five songs for the movie The Goldwyn Follies; when he died, he was intending to compose a ballet for the film's dancing star Vera Zorina to choreography by George Balanchine. After Gershwin's death, Vernon Duke supplied the additional music necessary for the film.
In July 2012, Marvin Hamlisch was selected to be the Principal Conductor for the Philadelphia Pops Orchestra. But on August 6, Hamlisch died suddenly, so Yannick Nézet-Séguin got selected in his place.
Penguin Cafe Orchestra ended with the death of founder Simon Jeffes from a brain tumour in 1997. His piano sketches for the group's planned sixth studio album were released as a solo album instead.
Gustav Mahler dreaded the "curse of the Ninth", so he snuck in an unnumbered symphony (aka the song cycle Das Lied von der Erde, although referring to it as a symphony is contentious) after his Symphony No. 8, thought he'd beaten the curse by finishing his Symphony No. 9 which was, in fact, his tenth... and died before completing his next symphony. The drafts of the 10th symphony at least were worked through to the end, but they were only partially orchestrated and a little sketchy. Deryck Cooke's completion of the symphony was the first and remains the most popular, but even this is bitterly contested since so much of the appeal of Mahler's symphonies lies in their orchestration.
It is hotly debated just how much Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart managed to finish his Requiem before his death, and how much was done by his assistant afterward. Süssmayr claimed to have composed the Sanctus, Benedictus and Agnus Dei from scratch, though it's been speculated he used some Mozart sketches. For instance, the second half of the Agnus Dei, the "Lux Aeterna" section, is just the first movement with new words. Which is a valid decision, but does damage Süssmayr's claims of originality.
Modest Mussorgsky died before he could finish his opera Khovanshchina. The opera was completed, revised, and scored by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov in 1881-1882. Igor Stravinsky and Maurice Ravel made their own arrangement in 1913 at the request of Russian art critic Sergei Diaghilev. And in 1959, Dmitri Shostakovich revised the opera based on Mussorgsky's vocal score; it's Shostakovich's version that is typically performed today. The Stravinsky-Ravel orchestration has been mostly forgotten, except for Stravinsky's finale.
Jacques Offenbach left his opera Les contes d'Hoffmann (The Tales of Hoffmann) unfinished when he died in 1880. In addition, much of the music he did complete for it was long mislaid or omitted from performances, especially in the Giuletta Act. The original edition of the opera was completed by Ernest Guiraud, but editors and producers have continued to tinker with the work ever since; its acts are not even always performed in the same order. Two of the best-known numbers in the Giuletta Act, the aria "Scintille, diamant" and the Sextet with Chorus, were not composed by Offenbach at all but merely based on his work, and were first performed as part of Hoffmann in a 1908 production.
Giacomo Puccini died before completing the opera Turandot; he had finished up to about the point of Liu's death and the rest was finished by Franco Alfano (not Puccini's first choice). At its premiere at La Scala, the famed conductor Arturo Toscanini laid down his baton there and said, "Qui finisce l'opera, perché a questo punto il maestro è morto" ("Here the opera ends, because at this point the maestro died"). Another recollection of Toscanini's statement is "Qui, il maestro fini" (Here, the master finished). This is more in keeping with Toscanini's terse, no-nonsense character. Puccini also died before deciding on an ending for La rondine. This has contributed to it being performed so infrequently afterwards.
Sergei Prokofiev was working on multiple compositions when he died of a cerebral haemorrhage in 1953. The concertino for cello and orchestra was left with an unfinished finale, but Prokofiev had indicated to the work's intended performer, Mstislav Rostropovich, how he planned to complete it, and Rostropovich put together a performing version with help from Prokofiev's fellow composer Dmitri Kabalevsky. Less fortunate were his Piano Sonata No.10 and sonata for solo cello, each of which was left with a single half-finished first movement, and the concerto for two pianos and string orchestra, of which only a few measures were completed.^note He was also planning an eleventh piano sonata and a substantial revision to his Symphony No.2,^note but had not even begun work on them when he died.
Near the end of his life, Swiss composer Joachim Raff began composing four symphonies inspired by the four seasons. Nos. 8-10 - Frühlingsklänge (Sounds of Spring), Im Sommer (In Summer), and Zur Herbstzeit (To Autumntime) - premiered between 1877 and 1880 to great acclaim, but No. 11 (Der Winter), the second on which composition began, was put in a drawer and forgotten about until Raff's death in 1882. His longtime friend and associate Max Erdmannsdörfer fleshed out the manuscript for a first performance in 1883, although how much of the result is by Raff and how much is by Erdmannsdörfer remains a matter of speculation.
Liechtenstein-born composer Josef Rheinberger planned to write a set of twenty-four organ sonatas, one for each of the major and minor keys, but he had only completed twenty of them by his death in 1901.^note
Kenneth Schermerhorn had almost completed leading the Nashville Symphony Orchestra in recording Heitor Villa-Lobos' Bachianas Brasileiras for Naxos Records when he died in 2005. At that time, all but the first suite had been recorded; Andrew Mogriela took over the baton for that recording to complete the project.
Satirized by Peter Schickele in Unbegun Symphony (included in the An Hysteric Return concert but not attributed to P.D.Q. Bach), which only has a third and a fourth movement; in his monologue describing the piece, he explains that he was born too late to write the first two movements.
Franz Schubert left no less than four unfinished symphonies upon his death, including his 7th, 8th (the Unfinished symphony), and 10th. He also left around half a dozen piano sonatas in partially completed states, most of which have been speculatively sketched to completion by some performers but all of which are generally either performed in their incomplete states or simply dropped from the repertoire. Schubert generally sketched pieces to the point where he could easily complete them if he found a publisher for them, but his success rate at finding publishers for his work during his lifetime was rather modest, meaning he left many unfinished manuscripts at his death.
Dmitri Shostakovich planned to write a set of 24 string quartets, one for each of the major and minor keys. However, he had only completed 15 (and had written a few sketches for a sixteenth) by his death in 1975.

Country

Country Music Child Popstar Amie Comeaux died at age 21 in a car crash in Louisiana. She had two albums' worth of material in the can at the time despite not having been on a label at the time (her previous label, Polydor, had closed a couple of years prior), and she ended up with two posthumous albums.
Montgomery Gentry was working on an album for Average Joes Entertainment in 2016 and 2017, but group member Troy Gentry died in a helicopter accident on September 8, 2017 (incidentally, the same day that a retired Don Williams died of natural causes). After Gentry died, it was revealed that the album would be released anyway. Other member Eddie Montgomery (brother of John Michael Montgomery) continued to tour under the Montgomery Gentry name, using members of their touring band to cover Troy's half of the Vocal Tag Team.
George Jones was planning a farewell tour which would have taken place in fall 2013, but died of respiratory issues at age 81 that April.
Hank Williams died quite young (29), leaving plenty of unreleased material behind and inevitably having several posthumous hits. Hank Williams Jr. even overdubbed one of his dad's unreleased songs as a "duet".
Keith Whitley died of alcohol poisoning in 1989 at the age of 33, three months before the release of his most successful album, I Wonder Do You Think of Me. This album produced #1 hits in its title track and "It Ain't Nothin'", plus the Top 3 hit "I'm Over You". After that, he charted the Top 20 duet with his widow Lorrie Morgan on "Til a Tear Becomes a Rose", which appeared on a Greatest Hits Album. RCA Records released Kentucky Bluebird in 1991, which included several unfinished demos fitted with new instrumentation and other previously-unreleased tidbits ranging from already-finished songs to American Country Countdown interviews. Two of the songs on this album, "Somebody's Doing Me Right" and "Brotherly Love" made the charts, with the latter (a duet with Earl Thomas Conley) going to #1 on Radio & Records. It was followed in 1994 with a tribute album featuring various artists' covers of Keith's songs (most notably Alison Krauss & Union Station's cover of "When You Say Nothing at All", which was a Top 5 hit), and a couple other previously-unreleased tracks, including a Posthumous Collaboration with Morgan. A year later, the same label released Wherever You Are Tonight, also composed of demos with new instrumentation dubbed in.

Electronic

Hi-NRG magnate Patrick Cowley died of complications brought on by AIDS just months after releasing his third album, Mind Warp. His last production overall was the single "Do You Wanna Funk?" with Sylvester, who himself succumbed to AIDS a few years afterwards. Sylvester's final recordings were posthumously compiled as Immortal in 1989.
Swedish DJ Tim Bergling, better known as Avicii, whose music helped define mainstream EDM in the 2010s, committed suicide in 2018, leaving his third studio album unfinished. Said album was finished by several collaborators and released posthumously as TIM.
Depeche Mode co-founder Andy Fletcher died of an aortic dissection on May 26, 2022, as the band was starting production on their 15th album, Memento Mori.
Keyboardist Dwayne Goettel of Skinny Puppy died of a heroin overdose while the album The Process was in the works, and the rest of the group disbanded for several years. cEvin Key and Nivek Ogre reformed the group in 2003 with Mark Walk.
The lead singer of Où Est Le Swimming Pool, Charles Haddon, committed suicide just before the release of their first (and likely last) album.
Jeremy Inkel, keyboardist for Left Spine Down and co-writer/producer for Front Line Assembly starting with Artificial Soldier, died of an asthma attack on January 13, 2018, while the latter band was producing Wake Up the Coma. Said album was released on Inkel's birthday in his memory and includes his final contributions to the band, "Mesmerized" and "Structures".
Alphaville keyboardist Martin Lister died on May 21st, 2014, just three weeks after he and singer Marian Gold participated in a fan forum chatroom. During that chat they announced that the next Alphaville album, Strange Attractor, would release on September 27th of that year. Although new keyboardist Carsten Brocker joined the band later that June, Strange Attractor was delayed two and a half years to April 7, 2017.
Jean-Michel Jarre had ambitious plans for early 1986, namely a new studio album titled Rendez-vous and a gigantic concert in Houston, TX, to celebrate the city's and the state's 150th anniversary as well as NASA's 25th anniversary. The astronaut Ron McNair was to play his soprano saxophone in space aboard the Space Shuttle Challenger on a track written for him, "Ron's Piece", both on the album and via a live link-up at the concert. It was that very Space Shuttle mission that was cut short when Challenger exploded after take-off. McNair's part on the album was played by Pierre Gossez instead, and the track got the additional title "Last Rendez-vous". As for the concert, Jarre considered canceling it altogether in the wake of the Challenger disaster, but he was convinced to carry on and play the show, also as a memorial to the victims of the disaster. He did play it with Kirk Whalum standing in for Ron McNair, and the concert broke records left and right.
Electronics pioneer Klaus Schulze passed on April 26, 2022, following a long struggle with renal disease, during which time he recorded the Swan Song album Deus Arrakis; said album's release was delayed from June to July 2022 out of respect.
SOPHIE released her debut album, Oil of Every Pearl's Un-Insides in 2018, and according to her brother (who was also her mixing engineer), she continued to stay busy, almost completing her follow-up album alongside hundreds of other unreleased tracks in her vault, but these were tragically halted in 2021 by her early death in a falling accident. Reportedly, the album was meant to be more pop than the avant-garde direction of OOEPUI, with the plan being to alternate between the two moods every few years, now sadly a massive case of What Could Have Been (as of June 2021, her family has begun discussions to posthumously release her archived music).
Former La Bouche singer Melanie Thornton died in a plane crash before her solo album could be completed. The vocals from two of her unreleased songs were used in a Posthumous Collaboration with the rest of the group.
Akira Complex, an artist popular within the Rhythm Game community, committed suicide before "Lucid Traveler", their collaboration with fellow rhythm game artist 3R2, was released in Arcaea and Cytus II. According to their record label, Attack the Music, they were also working on an album which will be released posthumously.

Hip Hop

Detroit-based producer and rapper J Dilla suffered from lupus and an incurable blood disease in his final years, but continued producing music until literally hours before his death in 2006. While he managed to finish Donuts, and lived to see its release, Dilla eventually got too sick to finish his other album, The Shining, which was 75% complete, and entrusted his longtime friend and fellow producer Karriem Riggins to finish it for him.
Juice WRLD had a fatal seizure at the Chicago airport in December 2019. He had at least one unreleased album at the time of his passing.
KMD was a hip hop group in the early 90s that had success with an album titled Mr. Hood. However, shortly before the release of the controversial album Black Bastards, member DJ Subroc died in a car crash, leaving the album unreleased until 2000. KMD broke up, and member Zev Love X, brother of Subroc, was deeply affected by his death, put on a mask, and started rapping as the mysterious MF DOOM.
Lil Peep died of an accidental overdose on November 15, 2017, before a planned show in Tucson. He had several projects in the pipeline, including part 2 of his debut and ultimately final album Come Over When You're Sober, which eventually saw a posthumous release in 2018.
Cali Swag District is an Los Angeles-based rap group that recorded the 2010 Dance Sensation "Teach Me How to Dougie". One of their members, Montae "M-Bone" Talbert, was murdered in a drive-by shooting in Inglewood, California in May 2011. They released the song "How to Do That" three days later in his honor. Their first album, which they were recording at the time, was released in July 2011 and they have only released one mixtape since. Although most dance sensations are one hit wonders anyway, the death of one of their members only a year after their hit song was release couldn't have helped matters. Cahron "JayAre" Childs died in 2014, the year their second mixtape was released.
Mac Miller died of a drug overdose in September 2018, while preparing for a tour to promote his then-recent album Swimming, and while working on the followup to that album, Circles, which was eventually completed by producer Jon Brion and released in early 2020.
When MF DOOM passed away in 2020, he had multiple planned projects languishing in Development Hell, including a sequel album to Madvillainy and a collaborative album with Ghostface Killah. He was also working on a collaborative EP with Flying Lotus at the time of his passing. It is unknown if they will be scrapped altogether or if any material related to the planned projects will see the light of day.
The Notorious B.I.G. was shot and killed just two weeks before the release his aptly titled sophomore album Life After Death.
Japanese producer Nujabes was killed in a car crash on February 26, 2010. Two projects he was working on at the time, Spiritual State and the "Luv(sic)" Hexalogy, were unfinished, and were eventually completed by his friends and collaborators.
New York rapper Pop Smoke was killed in a robbery before the release of his debut album, Shoot For The Stars, Aim For The Moon. The album was finished with the help of Pop Smoke's mentor, 50 Cent.
Tupac Shakur has become incredibly prolific after death. After a stint in prison and making a deal with the devil in the form of signing with infamous record label Death Row, Tupac churned out a mammoth number of songs (mainly by way of recording the vocals for said song in marathon recording sessions) prior to his death. The logic for this was to both make up for lost time after spending a year in prison at the height of his career and get his Death Row label contract fulfilled ASAP due to him realizing what a huge mistake it was to sign with the infamous label. The straightest example of this trope in action is The Don Killuminati: The 7 Day Theory, released two months after his murder, which is the last album with his creative input. Other than that, a good number of posthumous albums have been made and they've even constructed a lifelike hologram of him for Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg to perform tracks featuring Tupac alongside them in concert. Naturally, a common Epileptic Tree is that Tupac is still alive and producing new material.
Controversial rapper XXXTentacion was murdered in June 2018, just a few months after the release of his second album and while he was in the middle of a tour.

Metal

After Pantera broke up, the Abbott brothers (Dimebag Darrell and Vinnie Paul) formed a new band named Damageplan, which had a minor hit on rock radio with "Save Me". Tragically, any hope at a Pantera reunion was destroyed when Dimebag was murdered on stage in 2004, followed by Vinnie Paul's death in 2018. Damageplan left behind a cover of Phil Collins' "I Don't Care Anymore", which was never released but the guitar recording was sampled in a cover by Hellyeah (Vinnie Paul's third band).
When Ronnie James Dio (formerly of Black Sabbath) died of stomach cancer in 2010, his main band, Dio, was in the middle of making two follow-ups to the Concept Album Magica. Said follow-ups were left unfinished and unreleased as a result.
Just as Slayer would embark on a tour in 2011, Jeff Hanneman contracted necrotizing fasciitis, forcing them to bring in Gary Holt as a replacement. Kerry King stated that if he recovered from his health problems, he'd be welcome to return to the studio, but then Hanneman died of liver failure. He had left one song with the band, "Piano Wire", though the version included in the band's eventual and final album Repentless had King performing all the guitar parts.
Terry Jones, founding member and frontman of the seminal Doom Metal band Pagan Altar, passed away after a battle with cancer in May 2015. They had recorded most of the album Never Quite Dead, and news on the fate of the band in the wake of Terry's death was scarce until April 2017 when Terry's son Alan announced they would re-record the instrumental parts of Never Quite Dead, now retitled Room of Shadows, which was then released later that year. Brendan Radigan of Magic Circle has been the acting frontman in their live shows since 2017 as well.
Hideto Matsumoto (better known as "hide") from the band X Japan died before completing his third solo album, Ja, Zoo. It is still debated today whether his death was an accident or suicide, though most agree it was an accident. hide and his bandmate Yoshiki had also planned, up until hide's death, to reunite X Japan with another vocalist than Toshi or with hide on lead vocals in 2000.
A rather extreme case happened with Black Metal band Mayhem, as during production of their debut album, singer Dead killed himself (only his lyrics remained) and guitarist Euronymous was murdered by the bassist.
Quorthon of renowned Black Metal/Viking Metal band Bathory passed away in 2004, on the second part of what was supposed to be a four-piece Nordland album series.
Avenged Sevenfold were in the early stages of recording their 2010 album Nightmare when their drummer (and one of the founding members), Jimmy "The Rev" Sullivan, was found dead in his home in December 2009 of an overdose of painkillers combined with alcohol, and the coroner noted that he suffered from cardiomegaly (an enlarged heart) which may have also been a factor in his death. Production on the album was suspended and the drummer of Dream Theater, Mike Portnoy, stepped in to fill the remaining tracks on the song before temporarily touring with the band. The entire album is dedicated to The Rev's memory. Portnoy was not only The Rev's favorite drummer, but his inspiration and idol. Even years after his death, the members of the band still show signs of mourning him.
- The last song The Rev wrote was the piano ballad "Fiction". He sings the majority of the song, with M. Shadows only offering vocal accompaniment. The band have stated in various interviews that The Rev recorded the song in secret just three days before his death and turned in the finished track, stating, "this is it. This is the last song." It is written from the perspective of a person that has very recently passed on and is assuring their loved ones not to worry about them. Many of the fans and some of the band members themselves are convinced the song itself is his suicide note.
Type O Negative frontman Peter Steele died suddenly of an aortic aneurysm in April 2010, just as he was due to begin writing and recording for a followup to Dead Again. With his passing, the band ceased to exist as well.
The Visual Kei Symphonic Metal band Versailles had gone major in 2009, was recording their second full-length album, and was about to embark on its first world tour as a major band when, on August 9th, bassist Jasmine You, one of the most notable names in the VK scene, suddenly fell ill and died (with the exact cause of his death never announced publicly). At that time, their major label debut Jubilee was already in its final stages of production and was released five months after his death.

Pop

1980s Austrian pop singer Falco was working on a comeback album when he died tragically in a car accident in the Dominican Republic in 1998.
Teen Pop singer and The Voice contestant Christina Grimmie was working on her third album called Cliche that was apparently cancelled due to getting dropped from her label. After possibly losing motivation for a time, she started writing again and released an EP called Side A in early 2016. However, she would never see Side B due to being murdered in Orlando that June. Side B, the album All is Vanity, and a couple other singles have been released since then.
Michael Jackson died in 2009, weeks before the scheduled start of the This Is It residency show in London; rehearsal footage from the planning stages were ultimately cobbled together into a documentary of the same name. Additionally, he had been working on new songs in the last few years of his life, with many of them appearing on the posthumous album Michael a year later (though three songs were ultimately removed in 2022 due to allegations that soundalike Jason Malachi Fake Shemped for the departed singer).
Jonghyun, the lead singer and primary songwriter for Korean boy band SHINee, died by suicide in December 2017. His death came a few weeks before the release of his second solo album Poet | Artist.
Rolf Köhler, the lead singer of Systems in Blue, died of a stroke in September 2007 before the group could finish their second album, Out of the Blue. The rest of the group completed it as a Posthumous Collaboration.
In another case of Died During Production making an album possible, a Linda McCartney collection called Wild Prairie, which contained everything that she ever professionally sang lead on, was released in 1998 or 1999 after she died. Paul wanted the world to know she was a great musician, regardless of the evidence... The Wings-era works are mixed at best, but her most recent songs are excellent if you can get past the lyrics. "The White-Coated Man" (a collaboration with Chrissie Hynde) is especially haunting.
Moon Bin, the lead vocalist and main dancer of the Korean boy band, Astro, passed away on April 19, 2023. He and fellow Astro member Sanha were supposed to perform at the Dream Concert in Busan and attend a fan con tour in Jakarta in May.
Milli Vanilli was planning a comeback with Rob Pilatus and Fab Morovan as the actual lead singers, with the Girl You Know It's True vocalists as back-up singers. Their album, Back and In Attack, was cancelled when Rob suddenly died of a drug overdose in 1998.
Kyu Sakamoto, well known for his hit "Ue o Muite Arukō" (released overseas as "Sukiyaki"), died in the ill-fated Japan Airlines Flight 123 crash en route to a concert.
Latin Tejano superstar Selena had recorded six songs for her first English-language album, Dreaming of You, before she was shot and killed in March 1995. Her family and record company paid their respects by releasing the album with four of the songs she recorded and a mix of previous hits.
Yasuko Endo would've began a pop idol career in May 1986 with her debut single "In the Distance" with "Telephone" as the B-Side, but tragically, she took her own life by jumping off a building just two months prior. Despite having been completed, the single itself never got to see the light of day^note, as her death led to her now-defunct label Riv.Star Records destroying most existing copies of it at the time. Endo's death is widely believed to be the catalyst of similar suicides involving young people jumping off of buildings in Japan, known as the "Yukko Syndrome" after Yukiko Okada's own death, which followed just a few days later. That death even led to Pony Canyon shelving her ninth single "Hana no Image" (which was completed at the time) out of concern that releasing it would've led to more suicides. "Hana no Image" was later included in a posthumous album named Memorial Box, released in 1999.

Punk

Around 1985, Minutemen were making plans for a distinct triple album called Three Dudes, Six Sides, Half Studio, Half Live, consisting of new studio material plus a Live Album, with the latter to have a setlist determined by fan vote. Frontman D. Boon died in a van crash that year, so instead the band released Ballot Result, a live compilation largely centered around the same songs that fans had voted to include on Three Dudes..., a year later.
Joy Division were in the process of putting together two new songs, "Ceremony" and "In a Lonely Place", before frontman Ian Curtis hanged himself after a long battle with depression and epilepsy. The surviving bandmates would reconvene as New Order and finish the songs without Curtis, releasing them as their debut single. Joy Division's remaining non-album work would see various re-releases on a number of compilations.
The Exploding Hearts were a punk-revival band from Seattle. They probably could have made it big if it weren't for the fact that in 2003 their van rolled over, killing three of the four members. This left behind only one completed album, Guitar Romantic, and several unreleased songs for a scheduled album for the following year, and very little live footage of the band. Shattered was released in 2006 with the songs and several remixes along with a DVD of probably the only recording of a live Exploding Hearts performance in existence.
Mark E. Smith, the leader of prolific post-punk group The Fall (Band), died of cancer in the middle of their 2017-18 tour. Several shows on that tour - including what would have been the band's first American tour dates in a decade - postponed or canceled due to Smith's rapidly deteriorating health. Although he performed his final few shows from a wheelchair and was still as lively and full of venom as ever, video footage of those concerts show him to be exhausted, frequently out of breath or difficult to understand. Ultimately his health got so bad that the group had to scuttle several shows just before they were due to go on, including what would have been their final show on 17 November 2017. Mark had also hinted at an eventual second album for Von Südenfed, his electronic music collaboration with Mouse on Mars - with no indication of what, if any, material was completed before Mark's death, 2007's Tromatic Reflexxions is likely to remain the project's only release.
Hardcore punk band Snot was receiving a lot of attention in the late nineties from their major label debut Get Some and their infamous antics on the 1998 Ozzfest tour. They were working on a second album until singer Lynn Strait was tragically killed in a car accident. Because Lynn died before he recorded vocals for most of the album, the band used the recorded instrumental tracks for the tribute album Strait Up with guest vocals. One of the only tracks that had Lynn's vocals, "Choose What?", was later released as a bonus track on the live album Alive, while the other, "Absent," appeared as a track on Strait Up. The band broke up immediately following his death, but a couple of the members started a new revision of the band ten years later called Tons.
When Joe Strummer died in late 2002, The Clash had just been announced as a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee and the band's classic lineup was gearing up to reunite and perform at the ceremony. The band's co-leader Mick Jones has since confirmed that this reunion wouldn't have been a one-off, and they were planning to record a new album and go on tour as well. Streetcore, the final album by Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros, was completed as a Posthumous Collaboration with members of the Mescaleros themselves and released in 2003 - many vocal performances are first takes, a few songs were sourced from a solo session with Rick Rubin and might not have been originally intended for the album, and "Midnight Jam" is an instrumental that only features Strummer's voice via Spoken Word in Music samples.
Kino frontman Viktor Tsoi died in a car crash in 1990, and the last act of his band was to release The Black Album.
Sid Vicious died of an overdose at age 21, leaving only a few singles behind. A posthumous album, Sid Sings was released in the wake of his death. Seeing that the singing and production on it was horrible, not much else has been released ever since.

R&B/Soul

In 1979, Soul singer Donny Hathaway committed suicide during the recording of what was to be his second duet album with Roberta Flack. The album would be released one year after Hathaway's death.
TLC member Lisa "Left Eye" Lopes was killed in a car crash in 2002, during the recording of the group's latest album 3D. The album was eventually finished by T-Boz and Chilli (they were determined to finish it in Left Eye's honour), in some cases using Left Eye's previously-recorded rap solos. There was also a posthumous album of unfinished solo material that was released in 2009 and was finished with contributions from many artists, including Missy Elliott, Chamillionaire and the remaining members of TLC, T-Boz and Chili, as well as Left Eye's sister Reigndrop.
There's been speculation that Otis Redding intended "(Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay" to be part of a Sgt. Pepper-like concept album, but he and four of his bandmates were killed in a plane crash a mere three days after recording it; it ended up being the last song he ever recorded.
A year after her only top-10 hit, "Lovin' You", Minnie Riperton was diagnosed with breast cancer, and passed away three short years later in 1979 at age 31. Her posthumous album, Love Lives Forever, consists of vocals recorded from a session in 1978 overdubbed with music recorded after her death.
Back to Black is the last album we'll ever hear of Amy Winehouse. She was working on her third album when she died in 2011. Her last song, a duet with Tony Bennett called "Body and Soul", was released not long afterward.

Rock

It didn't take Led Zeppelin long to decide to break up after John Bonham died. Bonham's death was particularly ill-timed: it happened on the day Zep were rehearsing for a new US tour.
Chester Bennington committed suicide in his home in California seven days before Linkin Park's North American leg for the One More Light World Tour. Because of this, the rest of the tour was canceled and the remaining band members held a memorial concert in Los Angeles. According to Mike Shinoda, the band is on hiatus as he is uncertain on their future.
While David Bowie recorded ★ as a reflection on his battle with liver cancer, which ultimately killed him just two days after the album's release, producer Tony Visconti stated that Bowie was planning to make a follow-up and had already presented five demos to him. Because of Bowie's death, these songs were left unfinished and unreleased.
The Grateful Dead planned to release a new studio album in the early 1990s containing studio versions of the several new songs that had found their way into their concert setlists following the release of their Built to Last album in 1989. However, production dragged on for years, partly because frontman Jerry Garcia was apathetic about the new album and he did not record any lead vocals before his death in 1995. After his death, band members Bob Weir and Phil Lesh tried to compile an album from what had already been recorded but gave up in 1999 because there simply wasn't enough material to merit a release. The 2019 album Ready or Not contains live versions of nine songs from the Dead's final batch of new material, most of which were slated to appear on the never-completed studio album.
George Harrison died while working on the album Brainwashed; it was completed by his son Dhani Harrison and Electric Light Orchestra frontman Jeff Lynne, who previously co-produced Harrison's Cloud Nine and joined him as a member of The Traveling Wilburys. They made it considerably more lavish than George would have if he had lived — we have Word of God on that; Lynne felt that doing otherwise would've dishonored his memory. George Harrison was also one of the producers of Cirque du Soleil's Love; in the making-of special his wife and son are seen watching the troupe's dress rehearsal some months after George died, and it's eerie seeing Dhani (with wide, bright eyes) looking through a giant projection of his nearly-identical father.
Jimi Hendrix died before completing a planned double album provisionally titled First Rays of the New Rising Sun. It was subsequently released over three posthumous albums; Cry of Love, Rainbow Bridge, and War Heroes. When the Hendrix family regained control of his estate in 1997 they withdrew these albums and released a re-compiled First Rays..., based mostly on Jimi's notes, as an "official" Hendrix album. The "non-family" posthumous albums featured various session guitarists overdubbed and intermingled with Hendrix's work, and given that Hendrix's guitar is pretty much why people listen to him, fans were not amused in the slightest.
Buddy Holly wrote a bunch of new songs in the months leading up to his death (including "Peggy Sue Got Married" and "Crying, Waiting, Hoping") and recorded acoustic guitar demos of them. We'll never know how he intended to arrange them, but that didn't stop his label from overdubbing and releasing them on two separate occasions.
Peter Gabriel took so long to finish Up^note that the guest vocalist for "Signal to Noise", Pakistani Qawwali singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, died before he could record his parts. Gabriel had to resort to sourcing Khan's vocals from an early live performance of the song.
John Lennon recorded a large number of demos before his death in 1980 that were not used on Double Fantasy (his 1980 album with recorded with his wife, Yoko Ono).
- Six were released after being polished by Ono in 1984, along with six of Ono's compositions and released as the album Milk and Honey. Four more were given to the surviving Beatles by Ono in early 1994. The other three Beatles and producer Jeff Lynne reworked the demos into new Beatles songs, and "Free as a Bird" and "Real Love" were later released as singles and on The Beatles Anthology albums.
  - These new songs - which rather split the fanbase - were parodied by Mitch Benn in "Please Don't Release This Song" in which John Lennon pleads for his unfinished music not to be re-recorded and released after his death.
  - In 2023, the now-two-surviving Beatles, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, reunited to record "Now And Then", another Lennon demo the then-three-surviving Beatles had originally worked on during the Anthology sessions, promoting it as "the last Beatles song".
- John was also considering going on concert tours after several years of not doing so. In fact, he was actively planning a world tour to be called "One World One People", where the theme would be families and connection, but with futuristic special effects.
The day before Brazilian satirical band Mamonas Assassinas were to start an international tour (which would be followed by a break to record their second album), they were killed in a plane crash.
Queen's Made in Heaven was made with this in mind. After the release of Innuendo, frontman Freddie Mercury anticipated that he wouldn't live to see a follow-up, and recorded as much lead vocals as possible for his bandmates to flesh out into actual songs. However, due to his failing health, he only managed to record three. Of those three, only "A Winter's Tale" was actually completed in a way that could be fleshed out without altering or adding to the lead vocal track. Brian May had to sing the last verse of "Mother Love" because Freddie realized he wasn't fit to continue recording when they got to that verse; despite planning to finish the song later, he never made it back to the studio. Meanwhile, "You Don't Fool Me" was essentially scraps MacGyvered into a coherent song by producer David Richards. The other ten tracks were put together from past outtakes and side-projects.
Eddie Money died in September 2019, almost one month after publicly disclosing he had terminal esophageal cancer. By that time, he was working on a reality show called Real Money on AXS TV, which was in its second season (of note, the episode where he disclosed his cancer diagnosis aired one day before his death). The show's fate after his death is unclear at the moment.
Roy Orbison was in the midst of a major comeback after almost 20 years and a really tragic life (including a tour with the aforementioned The Traveling Wilburys)... when he suddenly died of a heart attack in 1988. His final album recorded in his lifetime Mystery Girl was released posthumously a month after his death, and its lead single "You Got It" was his first top ten hit on Billboard in 24 years.
After Roy Orbison (see above) died shortly after their first album's release, The Traveling Wilburys briefly considered Del Shannon as a replacement for Orbison, as Jeff Lynne was producing Shannon's comeback album, but he committed suicide before they could do anything together. The Wilburys paid tribute by covering his hit "Runaway", and said album was released posthumously in 1991.
Tom Petty died suddenly on October 2, 2017, only a week after he wrapped up his 40th anniversary tour with the Heartbreakers, who subsequently dissolved. In his last interviews, Tom said that the tour would probably be "the last big one". Although it's unclear if he was in the middle of working on anything right before he died, he did have plans for 2018 and beyond, including:
- A 2018 solo tour in which he performed his 1994 Wildflowers album in its entirety, which would be accompanied by a special reissue of the album that included a second disc worth of tracks that he had initially intended to include on the original release.
- A follow-up to the Heartbreakers' Hypnotic Eye, as well as a third Mudcrutch record, were intended to eventually be recorded.
- Right after his 40th anniversary tour wrapped, he planned to head into the studio to produce the second album by Los Angeles garage rock band The Shelters, who he raved about in his final interview.
On October 19, 2023, Atsushi Sakurai, the lead singer of the Visual Kei J-rock band BUCK-TICK, was rushed into the hospital as he was not feeling well when he performed in a concert in Yokohama. Later, he died of a brainstem hemorrhage.
Shortly after the Highway to Hell tour ended, AC/DC guitarists Angus and Malcolm Young showed singer Bon Scott some music they were writing for the follow-up, with him accompanying on drums. Then Scott died after a wild night of drinking. The Youngs considered disbanding, but instead recruited Brian Johnson and made Back in Black as a tribute to Scott, with great success.
Eddie Van Halen of Van Halen died in 2020 of throat cancer while the band was considering a "kitchen-sink" reunion tour with Sammy Hagar, Gary Cherone, and Michael Anthony rotating their respective vocalist and bassist duties with David Lee Roth and Wolfgang Van Halen. Unsurprisingly, his death put an end to the band.
Charlie Watts died in 2021 while The Rolling Stones were in the early phases of recording for Hackney Diamonds. He managed to complete drum parts for "Mess It Up" and "Live by the Sword", with Steve Jordan filling in for him on the rest of the album.
The B-52s began recording their Bouncing Off The Satellites album in 1985. The album was originally recorded early in that year, but their label rejected that version. The band starting rerecording the album with producer Tony Mansfield. Unfortunately, guitarist Ricky Wilson died during the sessions for the second version of the album, which meant that the songs he hadn't recorded parts for had to be overdubbed by session musicians. They were so short on material that one of the songs on the album ("Juicy Jungle") is an outtake from Fred Schneider's 1984 solo album. Whilst Bouncing Off the Satellites and several singles from it were released in 1986, the remaining band members were too upset due to Ricky's death to tour or promote it. Luckily, it got better for the band: drummer Keith Strickland had learned how to play Wilson's unique guitar style and took his place as the band's guitarist after his death. The band eventually began recording a new album, Cosmic Thing, which became very successful after its 1989 release. They have been together ever since.

Singer-Songwriter

When Jeff Buckley drowned in the Wolf River in 1997, he was in the middle of putting together My Sweetheart the Drunk, a planned follow-up to Grace; the producers had to guess the order of the songs that were going to appear. The double album Sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk was released the following year, reflecting the album's Troubled Production — the first disc contained the basically finished songs he and his band recorded with Television frontman Tom Verlaine as Record Producer, and the second disc is home demos made on a 4-track recorder.
After the breakup of 90s alt-rock one hit wonders School of Fish, the band's singer Josh Clayton-Felt began an acclaimed solo career as a singer/songwriter and the success of his second solo album led to him touring with the likes of Tori Amos. While working on his third album, to be called Center of Six, he was diagnosed with cancer, and died in 2000 before the album could be completed; he was 32. The songs eventually got released on two albums: one by Dreamworks Records in 2002 under the name Spirit Touches Ground, and another under the Center of Six title by Talking Cloud Records in 2003.
English poet Robert Graves recorded a reading of one of his works for David Sylvian's Gone to Earth, but died the year before the album released; his part is featured on the closing track, "Upon This Earth".
Harry Nilsson, who hadn't released an album since 1980 (and that album wasn't even issued in the United States), began recording a comeback album starting in 1993. He died on January 15, 1994, and it's been reported that he finished the album shortly before his death (mere hours before, according to one account). His passing apparently scuttled any release plans (though some of the songs were eventually leaked). The material eventually came out in 2019 as the album Losst and Founnd.
Peter Sarstedt, mostly known for his song "Where Do You Go To (My Lovely)" wrote a sequel to it called "The Last of the Breed (Lovely 2)". However, "Farewell Marie-Clair", continuing the story of the subject of the last two songs, unfortunately did not materialize due to this trope.
On July 4, 1984, singer-songwriter Jimmie Spheeris had just finished recording a comeback album. He was riding his motorbike back home when a drunk driver collided into him, hitting his head on the pavement. Spheeris was finally released in 2000.
Leonard Cohen died 17 days after the release of 2016's You Want It Darker but recorded enough material during production for two albums. According to his son, Adam, he was planning on making a follow-up with those tracks, which were mere "sketches" at the time of his death. Adam would eventually piece them together with a bevy of session musicians and release the results as Thanks for the Dance in 2019, two weeks after the third anniversary of Leonard's death.

Died During Production / Music

Previous

Index

Next

Died During Production / Music

Edit Locked

Previous

Index

Next